Field trip to AngularConnect

Field trip to AngularConnect

A couple of weeks ago the team and I made the trip to the other side of London to attend AngularConnect, the largest Angular conference in the world to date. I'm slightly biased about the event as I'm one of the organisers but the vibe was great and the speakers all did an amazing job getting everybody excited about Angular 2. I strongly recommend you check out some of the videos from the conference, the highlights for me were the keynote and talks about observables (Jeff Cross and Ben Lesh both gave talks about them).

Here's a short summary of the key take-aways from the conference.

THE GOOD

Angular 2 is fast. Really fast. 2x faster than react and 10x faster than angular 1 at rendering. At re-rendering it’s even more impressive and 50x faster than react for larger data sets.

Tooling is a big focus, and there was a lot of love for TypeScript. The latest alpha version of angular does away with the need to include tsd files separately and as such provides a more seamless integration. There were other sessions on tooling and generally speaking it feels like the whole ecosystem has upgraded with the move to Angular 2, not just the framework itself. Brad mentions in his keynote Angular 2 is more of a platform than just a specific framework now.

Multiple rendering targets. Angular 2 now has the ability to be rendered server side and also have mobile native UIs. Server side rendering is great for SEO but also for serving pages nearly instantly without having to wait for the scripts to load on the page.

Observables. RIP Promises. Angular 2 ships with a dependency on RxJS and uses it for most (maybe all) of it’s async operations like the default http implementation. Jeff Cross and Ben Lesh did two separate talks on the subject and they were both packed out.

Some of the more experimental features included the use of web workers for handling the digest cycle, this is great for keeping the main process focussed on the UI and could mean silky smooth apps on less premium devices.

Lots of other interesting talks, but my general take away was that the entire platform has upgraded, from animations to build processes. The general mood has shifted from fear of Angular 2 to a lot of excitement for all the new possibilities.

THE BAD

It’s still in alpha, the team aren’t interested in communicating timelines but expect beta some time this year and final in Q1 next year.

The upgrade path to Angular2 still feels clunky, a lot of work has been done here but the fact is that they’re different enough that there’s never going to be an easy upgrade path.

The pizza we had for dinner on day 1 was probably the worst I’ve ever had in my life